


something you love and understand

by digitalis



Category: Midnattsol (2016)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25235683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalis/pseuds/digitalis
Summary: He felt very bad, but he was also bored with it. It was nothing new, Jessika throwing things at him. Jessika hating him for honest mistakes, for slips of the tongue. For trying. For his permanent, intractable stupidity.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	something you love and understand

Jessika said, over lunch, “I’m going to France in October.”

Anders said, “Oh.”

“To see Nadji,” she clarified.

“Yes,” Anders said. “Yes, I imagine that’s why. Is he nice to you?”

She stared at him. Her eyes narrowed.

“We’re friends,” she said icily.

“Jessika,” he said, “I have used the _we’re friends_ line on more people than I can count, and as a _connoisseur_ of the phrase – ”

He dodged the teaspoon. He looked up from the dodge smiling and shrank back at her face.

“We almost died together,” she hissed, and she pushed off from the table so hard that the milk fell over and ran outside. She would be crying in the yard, then, for the next twenty or so minutes. If Anders went out to comfort her she’d just cry longer, and worse. He felt very bad, but he was also bored with it. It was nothing new, Jessika throwing things at him. Jessika hating him for honest mistakes, for slips of the tongue. For trying. For his permanent, intractable stupidity.

When she was seventeen months old, Jessika had hurled a wooden letterblock at him. He couldn’t remember why. Something about going to bed, probably, she never wanted to do that. He remembered the block, though, alternating red and green sides, and he remembered that he had managed to break a finger catching it. Jessika was very consistent. 

It bothered him, to think Josefin wasn’t making equivalent sacrifices. That seemed very unfair to Josefin. He arranged the compromises in his palm. How she had pushed her career to the side, taking care of Jessika. How she had stayed with him, in Kiruna, in this tiny town with its virgin-forest purity held in the mouth with gritty-tasting air, though she could be down in Stockholm or Malmö or even just – just! – Luleå.

Jessika didn’t throw things at Josefin.

Anders cleaned up the milk. He padded around the house and took the messenger bag carrying the laptop off the back of the couch. He shifted it hand to hand, and he thought about Nadji spending a night in the hospital for hypothermia, and how Jessika just needed a Xanax and a hot meal.

Anders didn’t go into the backyard. He went out the front door instead.

// 

Anders had slept with two men.

He had slept with more than two men, of course, but only these two counted.

The first, when Jessika was eight. A conference, in Rovaniemi, titled Trinational Polar Law: Securities and Development. Anders made it a game in his head to guess where everyone was from, based on handshake and eye contact. He was amused at his pettiness. He was more amused when he saw a Swedish flag pin on the lapel of an obvious Norwegian. He liked the little games they played. Detectives, prosecutors: all children, playing cops and robbers.

The conference didn’t interest him much, except for Simo Saarinen. Anders mistook him for Norwegian. Simo Saarinen did not have that look of mild panic in crowds that most Finns had. Simo Saarinen spoke English in the thick genial accent of a Canadian. He had grown up in a small town outside of Toronto, speaking kitchen Finnish with his grandparents, watching American cop shows, spending his high school summers in an unincorporated community in northern Ontario working unsupervised in half-legal lumberyards. He moved to Helsinki for university, and then to Rovaniemi for reasons unfathomable. “The spelling is worse here,” he said. “The hicks, though. The hicks is all the same.”

Anders learned all these things in five slightly spittle-dappled minutes. Simo Saarinen spoke bad Swedish rapidly and without the disturbing flatness Anders had come to expect from Finns. Outgoing and mobile. Rare. Simo saw the appreciation of a rare thing and jammed his hands in his pockets and grinned. He was prematurely gray and sloe-eyed and cultivated a beard just this side of wild. No ring. Not north of thirty.

Simo fascinated him. Anders knew that was dangerous. He had taught himself to slip away from fascinating men. Simo followed him to the complimentary buffet and to the presentations. Anders plucked out his details: he dressed far too primly for a hick, he had one gold tooth. Broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted. Callused hands. His perfect body betrayed his profession. He worked out to sculpt himself, not to bash down doors. Fucking lawyers. He held his handshakes too long. He whistled out the side of his mouth. He wore a silver bracelet, unmarked and polished and two fingers wide.

Simo Saarinen invited Anders to his flat for dinner. They ended up fucking all night, wordlessly, on every surface. Anders woke up at four in the morning starving and with a text from Josefin, telling him Jessika had a fever. He crept out and cried in a coffeeshop. The next night he went back to Simo’s place. The conference was a week long.

He should have felt exhilarated. He just felt sad for Josefin. For Jessika. He felt sad for Simo, until the last day. Anders overheard him say _my fiancée_ to a policeman from Jokkmokk _._ Simo admitted, with no prompting, that his fiancée was in Oulu working on her thesis. Anders, aware of his hypocrisy, said “Maybe you should tell her” and Simo said “Noora knows,” with a fox smile that told Anders that she knew and didn’t mind and would be jacking off to the phone call telling her about it. Anders was irritated by how easy they had it but he said nothing. Then they had sex in the living room.

And then Thor. Younger than Anders. Younger than Simo, comparatively. Anders worried he had a type. Anders worried he was making up for lost time in a damaging way. That he held a certain amount of power over Thor that could not be mediated away. Thor said “Will you shut up? Stop worrying.” Thor knew he was married. Thor was peculiarly amoral, or at least unconcerned. Maybe they were the same thing. He was patient with Anders’ body. He walked around naked a lot, or in a towel. He caught an enormous salmon and carried it to Anders’ place wrapped in butcher paper. Blood on his knuckles as he cleaned it. Blood on his lip where he’d absently wiped at his face. Anders’ tongue crept into his mouth, watching him skin it. A bear proud of his kill. 

Anders played his darker fantasies in silent loop, as he had when he was sixteen and twenty-nine and when he was following Simo Saarinen around Rovaniemi. He could have asked Thor: Thor seemed the kind to be accommodating. Anders knew himself, though. Denied water too long, the bud will drown in the first rain. He would sit happily looking at that line of blood on Thor’s lip.

He had slept with other men. Only those two counted. Tall sculpted bisexuals with curiously absent morals. Simo had given him a fake number. Anders found him on Facebook years later and was frightened enough by the shimmering beauty of the woman giggling into his neck in his profile picture to close the tab. He had blocked Thor on Facebook once, but only for a few hours, after he’d told Josefin, as if that would make him go away.

“You’ve ruined my life,” Josefin said to him.

 _I ruined my life for you,_ he didn’t say to Thor.

Perhaps, even if he wasn’t worth it to Thor, that was still worth it to him.

//

He did not know why he went to the house with the messenger bag still slung on his shoulder but he was there, legs aching, and Kristoffer Hanki was there as well, carefully blank, hung in the doorframe like another mad sacrifice. Kristoffer did not ask why he was there, just held the door open, and Anders did not mean to brush against him but there just wasn’t enough space, not with him carrying the laptop. Kristoffer watched him as he fumbled around looking for an outlet near the messy table, and Kristoffer watched him as he booted it up, and Kristoffer offered no comment with body or brow until the video played, and then he let out a great sigh, like a bear rousing from winter sleep.

“He’s speaking Swedish.”

“That’s the saddest part. That’s the saddest – Did he speak Sami?”

Kristoffer pushed his shoulder up, dropped it down.

“He knows not enough do.”

A dodge.

“He’s not wrong.”

Kristoffer said nothing.

“About any of it.”

Kristoffer’s face flickered.

“No,” he said. “He’s not.”

He rubbed at his face.

“We were right about the mine,” he said. “They’re not going to do anything about it. I can’t be mad at him for – I can be – I don’t know. It doesn’t make – It’s – I keep thinking what he did to Jenny-Ann…”

Deep breath, and Kristoffer cracked his knuckles. He was wearing a white T-shirt and his muscles moved in it in an interesting way.

_Anders, focus._

Kristoffer said, “If I’m logical then, well, yes, I can say, Eddie, you could have _done something._ Taken that voicemail from Evelina to the newspaper, for example. Imagine the scandal.”

“Yes,” Anders said, and was pleased that his throat had not dried out.

“But.” Bear sigh. “I’m not going to pretend – if I had a chance to take revenge for Evelina – would I want to do what he did? I – would want.”

“Would you do it?”

“Well,” Kristoffer said, “no. No, I wouldn’t. I’m not a fucking crazy person, am I?”

“Ah.”

“Eddie was a loon,” Kristoffer said. “Smart kid but a fucking loon.”

Kristoffer’s shirt lifted at the hip when he scratched at his brow. Kristoffer had to be fifteen years younger than him. Oh, God, he had a type, didn’t he.

“I don’t know why you’re here,” Kristoffer said, at last. He shucked at his arms.

“I just needed to show someone,” Anders said. “You understand.”

“Yes,” Kristoffer said, and the word contained the universe.

Anders was not unkind enough to ask for secrecy. It would be rude to assume Kristoffer was an idiot. He shut the laptop and found he couldn’t move.

“Another Sami suicide,” Kristoffer said.

“Yes, I suppose,” Anders said, in his choppy Sami, and then, when Kristoffer didn’t react he said, “Or, no, no. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think maybe it’s another murder.”

They stood there together, in the house still drafty from the broken windows, with the picture of Evelina Geatki quiet and intense on the wall.

Kristoffer said, after a great long silence, “You walked here?”

And Anders did not have time to react before Kristoffer had taken the laptop from him and put it in the messenger bag. He picked up a USB drive from the messy table.

“You’ll have to drive,” he said, and tossed keys at Anders, which Anders failed to catch and had to scuttle around on the floor to pick up. “I can copy that on the way there.”

“Why do you need a copy of it?”

“Because I loved Evelina,” Kristoffer said.

Anders waited for further explanation but Kristoffer just shrugged the messenger bag onto his shoulder and went out the door. Anders scuffed the keys against his lips like he was trying to taste them and sighed. He didn’t need further explanation, not really. He understood.

//

Jessika was in the front yard, and she was crying, she was really crying, she had been crying since she ran out of the house, wild and exhausted and past sobbing, and Kristoffer came out of the car before it had quite stopped and went to her. He sat next to her, and Anders parked the car and set his head on the wheel, because he was an idiot for making her upset and shouldn't upset her more. Christ what a failure of a father he was.

He thought very selfish things, about Jessika, about himself, about Kristoffer Hanki’s broad arm on his daughter’s heaving shoulders, and then he thought about Eddie Geatki, and about Josefin refusing to pick up his calls, and his mother doing the same, and he thought about Simo Saarinen, and he thought about Kahina Zadi stumbling through the swamps with her hand lifted out of the water and he thought about Thor after his first sunburn of the Arctic summer night propped up against the headboard with a cold towel on the reddest patch on his belly, listening to Anders ramble sun-drunk about the Saívu people. All these people he did not have any more. All these lives ruined this summer in Kiruna.

But Jessika at least would have Nadji, in October.

It was unfair to toss around things like worth it and not worth it when it came to people.

The laptop was in the back seat. Kristoffer had balanced it on his lap for the drive. It chirped as it finished copying the file onto the USB.

Anders got out of the car, and he sat next to Jessika on the damp lawn, and she scrunched away from Kristoffer and buried her head in Anders’ chest. And Kristoffer put his hand on Anders’ back. Anders had a type, yes, and he almost laughed that he’d realized that right now, and then he wrapped his arms around Jessika’s shoulders and held her as he had the night she was seventeen months old and hadn’t wanted to go to bed, or whatever it had been. He balanced her in the crook of one arm with his throbbing finger thrust into his mouth and said sh-sh-sh to her and paced until she stopped hiccupping. She fell asleep on his chest, on the couch.

Kristoffer, after a while, helped them both into the house. Jessika finished her lunch and then went upstairs to go back to sleep. Anders made coffee, and he sat with his forehead on his palms and wept, and Kristoffer spoke in Sami to him slowly, so he would understand. Kristoffer brought the laptop back in and he put his hand on Anders' shoulder. 

"I think you should go to France," Kristoffer said.

Kristoffer would be going back to the Young Sami house to face the picture of Evelina Geatki alone.

"You should come to dinner sometime this week," Anders said, except he mistimed it and hiccuped on _week_. He meant it innocently, of course.

Kristoffer shrugged, a little smile tugging at his face. "Sure," he said. 

"I don't know if I should go to France. They almost died together, the kids."

"So did all of us," Kristoffer said.

He collapsed, suddenly, into what had been Jessika's chair.

He stayed with Anders, drinking coffee, til the first darkness of autumn came creeping in on the heels of the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> There are like three people who watched this show (Midnight Sun, 2016, it's Fucking Amazing) and they're all me in slightly different timezones. Whatever. 
> 
> Title is a Skynyrd song because that's an Anders mood but also it's the [Shinedown version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgFQ6WmxdMs).


End file.
